CPU Contests No Trivial Pursuits

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CPU Contests No Trivial Pursuits

The results might lead to scientific discovery, computing advances, or the discovery of alien life. Contestants can even win cash. But distributed computing contests are really about being Number 1.

And people will do whatever it takes – co-opting corporate or university resources, even cheating – to top the Net's most-committed list.

Distributed computing projects have volunteers all over the world donating idle processing time on their computers to achieve a common goal.

One such contest, Distributed.net’s RC5-64 challenge, is trying to break the 64-bit encryption key from RSA Data Security. RSA is offering a cash prize of US$10,000, but Distributed.net, if it wins, will keep $6,000 to pay its own bills and give another $2,000 to charity. The winner gets $2,000.

In July, a Russian team claiming to be powered by the Elbrus E2k chip burst onto the Distributed.net rankings with an outrageous claim. The Russians boasted a key-checking rate that was more than 200 times faster than a single Pentium III 550.

Suspecting something was amiss, the Distributed.net staff discovered the Russians were using a hacked key-checking client that artificially boosted their numbers.

The hack job didn't help the Russians find the winning key, but it did let them fetch keys and immediately report the tasks as completed. All that did was increase their key rate, vaulting them into the No. 1 position on the project stats page, and giving them temporary bragging rights.

Had the Russians been sent the winning key but reported back that it didn't work, they would have ruined the contest, said David McNett, a programmer and database administrator who runs Distributed.net.

"We rely on people testing the blocks (of data), and if that doesn't happen it jeopardizes the integrity of the entire project," he said.A more scientific pursuit is the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). The project encourages people to use their idle PC computing cycles to search for prime numbers that are larger than any previously identified.

GIMPS has 14,000 members running a total of 23,000 machines, far fewer than RC5 and SETI@Home. GIMPS is run and managed by Entropia.com, a distributed computing service set up specifically for the GIMPS effort.

GIMPS has been running since 1996, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) made things a lot more interesting in April, when it announced it would award cash prizes to whomever finds large prime numbers. One person, who found a one-million-digit prime in June, has already collected $50,000.

Entropia founder Scott Kurowski said the contributors to the project are motivated by more than money. A poll on the site shows 26 percent of contestants are in it because they think it’s a good use of idle PC time, while only 2 percent say they're in it for the financial reward.

"In my opinion, people are joining GIMPS because they are unhappy or dissatisfied with SETI@Home or RC5 and want to join a more successful and serious research project," he said.

That’s the story behind Temple University’s College of Arts and Sciences lab, which has 267 Pentium Pro and Pentium II computers running the GIMPS client nonstop. TempleU-CAS is the current leader in the GIMPS search effort with 11,641 CPU hours per day."I was very impressed with Prime95 and PrimeNet, and the general idea of searching for large prime numbers appealed more to me then the hackerish searching for an encryption key," said Marc Getty, a network administrator at Temple University. Getty convinced the university administration to let him install the Prime95 client software on all the lab's PCs, so they could crank on the numbers during idle time.

"I have no idea what I would do with the money if I was to be awarded the EFF prize," said Getty. "I was not looking to 'win' GIMPS. It's not a game or a prize where the goal is to win. Rather ... the goal is to find Mersenne Prime numbers and further the use of distributed computing."

Having idle PCs is one thing, but having a half dozen of some of the world's fastest Unix servers is another.

That’s a luxury afforded to John Kole, an applications programmer in Hewlett-Packard's business critical computing division. And he’s made good use of it. Kole has run SETI@Home on idle HP V Series as well as on N Series servers, HP’s fastest Unix servers. With up to 32 PA/RISC processors in each, the servers can run a copy of the SETI@Home client for each CPU.

With as many as a dozen servers at his disposal, Kole has been able to rack up tremendous gains since he started running SETI@Home in June. He’s the No. 4-ranked user on SETI@Home’s stats page, behind teams from Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems.

In two months, Kole's legion of turbo-crunchers have managed to process 35,000 units of data, or 19.22 years worth of CPU time. The Unix boxes average four hours, 45 minutes per work unit, far outpacing a Pentium III 550 PC, which needs 12 hours.

Kole became interested in the SETI@Home project when he saw that the competition, namely Sun and SGI, had a large presence on the site.

"I wondered if I could catch those guys," he said. "It sure seemed to me like they were adding a whole lot more units of work once I got started."

Kole said HP management knows of his efforts, and the marketing department is trying to develop a campaign around the results.